Power

Question 1

Oranges and the Long Queen - Long Queen

Answer 1

• ‘the Long Queen couldn’t die’ - immortality of women creates an image of eternal power of motherhood, legacy of women is eternal as it is carried through children - reminiscent of queen Victoria or Elizabeth who were emblems of female power and agaency
• ‘she sent her explorers away in their creaking ships’ - reclaiming exploration and potential colonialism - typically male fields - allusion to QE1 and Francis drake
• she serves as a metaphor for female experience, using the extend conciet of a goddess - the deity of femininity: ‘some said in a castle, some said in a tower’ - rapunzel allusion - rprimarily male storytellers attempt to filter female stories through the lens of a damsel in distress, LQ reinvents this into something powerful

Question 1

the long queen and oranges: main point of argument

Answer 1

• both present atypical female authority figures which challenge patriarchal authority

Question 2

Oranges and the Long Queen -Oranges

Answer 2

• Louis is also an atypical figure of female authority. She combats and subverts gender sterotypes
• ‘my father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle[’ - dad = passive, mother as combative
• her Manichean world view is perhaps also a source of power: ‘she always prayed standing up, because of her knees, just as Bonaparte always gave order from his horse’ - epiphora - rhetorical device, establishing her as a dictatorial figure highlighting her enormous power.
• in contrast with the Long Queen, this sense of power is perhaps a lot more sinister
  ‘she would get a chuold, train it, build it, dedicate it to the lord’ - suggests a lack of motherly love - perhaps this difference is due to the fact that the Long Queen’s deity makes her external to a patriarchal society and therefore she exercises full power whilst Mrs Winterso is very much subject to the church - ‘if there was such a thing as spiritual adultery my mother was a whore’

Question 3

the long queen and the laughter of Stafford gils high - main point of comparison

Answer 3

• ## female existence as something unifying, shared female power in the face of male oppression

Question 4

the long queen and Stafford Girls high - the long queen

Answer 4

• The Long Queen: ‘No girl who was n’t the long queen’s always child’ - all women are under her jurisdiction presenting femininity as a unifying force
• ‘no girl growing who wasn’t the apple of the long queen’s eyes’ - apple imagery references eve - subverting edenic criticism of woman into a display of female power - reflecting a sense of inclusivity
• ‘blood, in the long queen’s colour’ -= universal female experience of mestruation is transformed into. symbol of female power
  ‘the light music of girls, the drums of women’ - women are presented as harmonious and orchestra; - collective female power demonstrated in sound just as in the laughter of Stafford girls high

Question 5

Stafford girls and long queen: Stafford girls

Answer 5

• ‘laughter serves as an allegory for the rise of 2nd wave feminism as represented by the youthful hilarity of the novel
• laughter is presented as something self-liberating
  ‘the suffer jackpot leap of a silverfish in the purse of a pool’ - power and beauty of laughter. water imagery - unstoppable, powerful.
  ‘till the classroom came to the boil with a broth mirth’ - water bubbling, they are equal and unstoppable - generating power to threaten patriarchal authority
  ‘ a cauldron of noise’ - reclaims negative charges of witchcraft against women,
  ‘percussion of trills and whoops’\ - chorus
  ‘the chaos coming in waves through the wall’ - feminism as powerful and disruptive.

Question 6

Stafford girls high and oranges: main point

Answer 6

• female power represents a direct challenge to patriarchal authority

Question 7

Stafford girls high and oranges: oranges:

Answer 7

• the power to challenge the status quo is double eded - it means she must also completely abandon her past identity
• sh challenges it through childhood and retrospectively through narration and metanarrative. Retrospective narration grants Jeanette the power to rewrite her own identity and challenge the past
  ‘Pastor spratt/finch’ - she emasculate them - they are major inside the insular church world, but meaningless outside - she therefore subverts the masculine power of the church.
• p[art of the kunstleroman form - challenges patriarchal power via language
  ‘there was some fuzzy felt to make bible scenes with;’ - post. modernism = retelling of the bible and manipulation of sacred text, subverting it into something insighnificant
  ‘but usually I drowned t’ - through play she challenges biblical narratives in a destructive fashion, foreshadowing her schism with the church

Question 8

oranges and Stafford girls: Stafford girls

Answer 8

-their rejection of the rigid 1960s education. system represents a challenge to patriarchal power which seeks to impose a way of life upon them
- ‘steadily squeaking her chalk on the board’ - sibilance: tediousness of daily life - girls cannot challenge anything ‘the folded note, torn from the back of the king James bible’ - challenges the authority of the patriarchal church - ‘how could they hope to grow up to be the finest of England’s daughters and wives’ =
‘you girls have laughed this once great school into the ground - defers conservative traditional education, in the same way that Jerusalem is reclaimed